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If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you're doing something wrong.
Noam Chomsky
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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Linguist
Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
Chomsky
Offending
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky
The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.
Noam Chomsky
The actual consequences of Plan Colombia are to devastate peasant communities, which have been driven to drug production. These peasants have no particular desire to grow coca, but their other means of livelihood have been wiped out.
Noam Chomsky
The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.
Noam Chomsky
The Obama administration is dedicated to increasing terrorism. In fact, he is doing it all over the world. Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history. The drone assassination campaigns - which are just part of the special forces operations and so on - all of these operations are terror operations.
Noam Chomsky
We had one or another form of state capitalism during an extremely brief period of human history, which tells us essentially nothing about human nature. If you look at human societies and human interactions, you can find anything. You find selfishness, you find altruism, you find sympathy.
Noam Chomsky
Don't be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.
Noam Chomsky
The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.
Noam Chomsky
Obama's primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created.
Noam Chomsky
The United States is a violent military state. It's been involved in military action all over the place.
Noam Chomsky
The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it's austerity in the midst of recession and that's guaranteed to be a disaster. There's some resistance to that now. In the US, it's essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration.
Noam Chomsky
Radical activists can't ignore the fact that we live in this world, like it or not, and have to make difficult decisions about which paths are the best - or sometimes, the least harmful. There are no abstract formulas. Have to think through each case on its own.
Noam Chomsky
The UN can go as far as the U.S. will allow, and no further. And it's bound by conditions that the powerful states, which means mostly the U.S., impose.
Noam Chomsky
You never know how [Donald Trump] is going to react. When he learned for example that he'd lost the election by about three million votes, his instant reaction was insanity you know, three to five million illegal immigrants somehow were organized in some incredible fashion to vote.
Noam Chomsky
Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.
Noam Chomsky
In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.
Noam Chomsky
Nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11, but we can think of the United States as an innocent victim only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret.
Noam Chomsky
Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.
Noam Chomsky
Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it's growth in a sense.
Noam Chomsky
If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
Power has to be protected from scrutiny. That's the principle of every dictatorship, of every autocracy. You hear it from high priests at Harvard and every government department, that power has to be kept secret otherwise it will fade and it won't work. But Bradley Manning is violating that principle.
Noam Chomsky